1,112 turtle eggs were excavated from vulnerable nest around Long Point and transported to the Marshview Welcome and Education Centre at Long Point Eco Adventures by a team of dedicated volunteers. These eggs—collected over the summer of 2024—were the first ever collected for the Long Point Turtle Hatchery!
They include midland painted, snapping, and norther map turtle eggs. Our mentors and colleagues at the Turtle Lab in the London Watershed Conservation Centre graciously took in many more clutches when we reached our processing capacity. This included all of our threatened Blanding’s turtle eggs.
With your support, thousands of hatching turtles will peck their way out of their shells in the years ahead. But each must be health checked, measured, weighed, and finally released into the marsh and this must be within 1 km of where their mothers originally laid them. At the same time, we hope to have a multi-faceted exhibit in place to educate students, visitors, and area residents about the need for road ecology projects. This will help address the core problem facing our turtles (deaths on roads) that make volunteer road patrols and nest excavation necessary.
None of this would have been possible without the generous donations our community contributed alongside support from the Long Point Biosphere Region, Eco Adventures, Scott Gillingwater and his Turtle Lab team in London, our amazing Wildlife Road Watch volunteers, Environment and Climate Change Canada through the LPWF Priority Place’s Road Ecology Working Group, Eco-Kare International, and Eco Canada.
We now have an urgent need for materials and funds to complete the task and, we hope, establish the hatchery as a permanent facility serving the Long Point Biosphere Region.
Please consider contributing to the Long Point Biosphere Region Turtle Hatchery!
If you are not able to contribute financially but wish to help another way, please consider joining Wildlife Road Watch, our volunteer program. You will be trained to safely help turtles cross roads and to identify turtle nests for excavation along several key nesting hotspots.
If you are interested, please consider subscribing at wildlifeonroads.com or reach out to Lauren at lnightingale@eco-kare.com for more information.
For more on what’s happening in the Long Point Biosphere check out our newsletter he